The Largest Covert Operation in CIA History

by Chalmers Johnson

Mr. Johnson is the author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic, to be published in January by Metropolitan Books.

The Central Intelligence Agency has an almost unblemished record of screwing up
every "secret" armed intervention it ever undertook. From the overthrow
of the Iranian government in 1953 through the Bay of Pigs, the failed attempts
to assassinate Fidel Castro of Cuba and Patrice Lumumba of the Republic of Congo,
the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, the "secret war" in Laos, aid to the
Greek colonels who seized power in 1967, the 1973 killing of Salvador Allende
in Chile and Ronald Reagan's Iran-contra war against Nicaragua, there is not a
single instance in which the agency's activities did not prove acutely embarrassing
to the United States. The CIA continues to get away with this primarily because
its budget and operations have always been secret and Congress is normally too
indifferent to its constitutional functions to rein in a rogue bureaucracy. Therefore
the tale of a purported CIA success story should be of some interest.

According to the author of the newly released Charlie Wilson's War,
the exception to CIA incompetence was the arming between 1979 and 1988 of thousands
of Afghan moujahedeen ("freedom fighters"). The agency flooded Afghanistan
with an astonishing array of extremely dangerous weapons and "unapologetically
mov[ed] to equip and train cadres of high tech holy warriors in the art of waging
a war of urban terror against a modern superpower," in this case, the USSR.

The author of this glowing account, George Crile, is a veteran producer for
the CBS television news show "60 Minutes" and an exuberant Tom Clancy-type
enthusiast for the Afghan caper. He argues that the U.S. clandestine
involvement in Afghanistan was "the largest and most successful CIA
operation in history" and "the one morally unambiguous crusade of
our time."
He adds that "there was nothing so romantic and exciting as this war against
the Evil Empire." Crile's sole measure of success is the number of Soviet
soldiers killed (about 15,000), which undermined Soviet morale and
contributed to the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the period from
1989 to 1991. That's the successful part.

However, he never mentions that the "tens of thousands of fanatical Muslim
fundamentalists" the CIA armed are some of the same people who in 1996
killed 19 American airmen at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia; bombed our embassies in
Kenya and Tanzania in 1998; blew a hole in the side of the U.S. destroyer Cole
in Aden harbor in 2000; and on Sept. 11, 2001, flew hijacked airliners into
New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Today, the world awaits what
is almost certain to happen soon at some airport -- a terrorist firing a U.S.
Stinger low-level surface-to-air missile (manufactured at one time by General
Dynamics in Rancho Cucamonga) into an American jumbo jet. The CIA supplied thousands
of them to the moujahedeen and trained them to be experts in their use. If the
CIA's activities in Afghanistan are a "success story," then Enron
should be considered a model of corporate behavior.

Nonetheless, Crile's account is important, if appalling, precisely because
it details how a ruthless ignoramus congressman and a high-ranking CIA thug
managed to hijack American foreign policy. From 1973 to 1996, Charlie Wilson
represented the 2nd District of Texas in the U.S. House of Representatives.
His constituency was in the heart of the East Texas Bible Belt and was the
long-held fiefdom of his fellow Democrat, Martin Dies, the first chairman of
the House Un-American Affairs Committee. Wilson is 6 feet, 4 inches tall and
"handsome, with one of those classic outdoor faces that tobacco companies
bet millions on." He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1956, eighth from
the bottom of his class and with more demerits than any other cadet in
Annapolis history.

After serving in the Texas Legislature, he arrived in Washington in 1973 and
quickly became known as "Good Time Charlie," "the biggest playboy
in
Congress." He hired only good-looking women for his staff and escorted
"a
parade of beauty queens to White House parties." Even Crile, who featured
Wilson many times on "60 Minutes" and obviously admires him, describes
him
as "a seemingly corrupt, cocaine snorting, scandal prone womanizer who
the
CIA was convinced could only get the Agency into terrible trouble if it
permitted him to become involved in any way in its operations."

Wilson's partner in getting the CIA to arm the moujahedeen was Gust
Avrakotos, the son of working-class Greek immigrants from the steel workers'
town of Aliquippa, Pa. Only in 1960 did the CIA begin to recruit officers
for the Directorate of Operations from among what it called "new Americans,"
meaning such ethnic groups as Chinese, Japanese, Latinos and Greek
Americans. Until then, it had followed its British model and taken only Ivy
League sons of the Eastern Establishment. Avrakotos joined the CIA in 1961
and came to nurture a hatred of the bluebloods, or "cake eaters,"
as he
called them, who discriminated against him. After "spook school" at
Camp
Peary, next door to Jamestown, Va., he was posted to Athens, where, as a
Greek speaker, he remained until 1978.

During Avrakotos's time in Greece, the CIA was instrumental in destroying Greek
freedom and helping to turn the country into probably the single most anti-American
democracy on Earth today. Incredibly, Crile describes this as follows: "On
April 21, 1967, he [Avrakotos] got one of those breaks that can make a career.
A military junta seized power in Athens that day and suspended democratic and
constitutional government." Avrakotos became the CIA's chief liaison with
the Greek colonels. After the fall of the colonels' brutally fascist regime,
the 17 November terrorist organization assassinated the CIA's Athens station
chief, Richard Welch, on Dec. 23, 1975, and "Gust came to be vilified in
the Greek radical press as the sinister force responsible for most of the country's
many ills." He left the country in 1978 but could not get another decent
assignment -- he tried for Helsinki -- because the head of the European Division
regarded him as simply too uncouth to send to any of its capitals. He sat around
Langley for several years without work until he was recruited by John McGaffin,
head of the Afghan program. "If it's really true that you have nothing
to do," McGaffin said, "why not come upstairs? We're killing Russians."

Wilson was the moneybags and sparkplug of this pair; Avrakotos was a street
fighter who relished giving Kalashnikovs and Stingers to the tribesmen in
Afghanistan. Wilson was the more complex of the two, and Crile argues that
his "Good Time Charlie" image was actually a cover for a Barry Goldwater
kind of hyper-patriotism. But Wilson was also a liberal on the proposed
Equal Rights Amendment and a close friend of the late Congresswoman Barbara
Jordan (D-Texas), and his sister Sharon became chairwoman of the board of
Planned Parenthood.

As a boy, Wilson was fascinated by World War II and developed an almost
childlike belief that he possessed a "special destiny" to "kill
bad guys"
and help underdogs prevail over their enemies. When he entered Congress,
just at the time of the Yom Kippur War, he became a passionate supporter of
Israel. After he traveled to Israel, the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee began to steer large amounts of money from all over the country to
him and to cultivate him as "one of Israel's most important Congressional
champions: a non-Jew with no Jewish constituents." Jewish members of
Congress also rallied to put Wilson on the all-powerful Appropriations
Committee in order to guarantee Israel's annual $3-billion subsidy. His own
Texas delegation opposed his appointment.

Wilson was not discriminating in his largess. He also became a supporter of
Anastasio "Tacho" Somoza, the West Point graduate and dictator of
Nicaragua
who in 1979 was swept away by popular fury. Before that happened, President
Carter tried to cut the $3.1-million annual U.S. aid package to Nicaragua,
but Wilson, declaring Somoza to be "America's oldest anti-Communist ally
in
Central America," opposed the president and prevailed.

During Wilson's long tenure on the House Appropriations Committee, one of its
subcommittee chairmen, Clarence D. "Doc" Long, used to have a sign
mounted over his desk: "Them that has the gold makes the rules." Wilson
advanced rapidly on this most powerful of congressional committees. He was first
appointed to the foreign operations subcommittee, which doles out foreign aid.
He then did a big favor for then-Speaker Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill Jr.
(D-Mass.). The chairman of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee at the time,
Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), had been caught in the FBI's ABSCAM sting operation
in which an agent disguised as a Saudi sheik offered members of Congress large
cash bribes. O'Neill put Wilson on the Ethics Committee to save Murtha, which
he did. In return, O'Neill assigned Wilson to the defense appropriations subcommittee
and made him a life member of the governing board of the John F. Kennedy Performing
Arts Center, where he delighted in taking his young dates. Wilson soon discovered
that all of the CIA's budget and 40 percent of the Pentagon's budget is "black,"
hidden from the public and even from Congress. As a member of the defense subcommittee,
he could arrange to have virtually any amount of money added to whatever black
project he supported. So long as Wilson did favors for other members on the
subcommittee, such as supporting defense projects in their districts, they would
never object to his private obsessions.

About this time, Wilson came under the influence of a remarkable, rabidly
conservative Houston woman in her mid-40s, Joanne Herring. They later fell
in love, although they never married. She had a reputation among the rich of
the River Oaks section of Houston as a collector of powerful men, a social
lioness and hostess to her fellow members of the John Birch Society. She
counted among her friends Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, dictator and first
lady of the Philippines, and Yaqub Khan, Pakistan's ambassador to
Washington, D.C., who got Herring named as Pakistan's honorary consul for
Houston.

In July 1977, the head of Pakistan's army, Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, seized power
and declared martial law, and in 1979, he hanged Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the
president who had promoted him. In retaliation, Carter cut off U.S. aid to
Pakistan. In 1980, Herring went to Islamabad and was so entranced by Zia and
his support for the Afghan freedom fighters that on her return to the United
States, she encouraged Wilson to go to Pakistan. There he met Zia, learned
about the Afghan moujahedeen and became a convert to the cause. Once Reagan
replaced Carter, Wilson was able to restore Zia's aid money and added
several millions to the CIA's funds for secretly arming the Afghan
guerrillas, each dollar of which the Saudi government secretly matched.

Although Wilson romanticized the mountain warriors of Afghanistan, the
struggle was never as uneven as it seemed. Pakistan provided the fighters
with sanctuary, training and arms and even sent its own officers into
Afghanistan as advisors on military operations. Saudi Arabia served as the
fighters' banker, providing hundred of millions with no strings attached.
Several governments, including those of Egypt, China and Israel, secretly
supplied arms. And the insurgency enjoyed the backing of the United States
through the CIA.

Wilson's and the CIA's greatest preoccupation was supplying the Afghans with
something effective against the Soviets' most feared weapon, the Mi-24 Hind
helicopter gunship. The Red Army used it to slaughter innumerable
moujahedeen as well as to shoot up Afghan villages. Wilson favored the
Oerlikon antiaircraft gun made in Switzerland (it was later charged that he
was on the take from the Zurich-based arms manufacturer). Avrakotos opposed
it because it was too heavy for guerrillas to move easily, but he could not
openly stand in Wilson's way. After months of controversy, the Joint Chiefs
of Staff finally dropped their objections to supplying the American Stinger,
President Reagan signed off on it, and the "silver bullet" was on
its way.
The Stinger had never before been used in combat. It proved to be murderous
against the Hinds, and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev decided to cut
his losses and get out altogether. In Wilson's postwar tour of Afghanistan,
moujahedeen fighters surrounded him and triumphantly fired their missiles
for his benefit. They also gave him as a souvenir the stock from the first
Stinger to shoot down a Hind gunship.

The CIA "bluebloods" fired Avrakotos in the summer of 1986, and he
retired
to Rome. Wilson became chairman of the Intelligence Oversight Committee, at
which time he wrote to his CIA friends, "Well, gentlemen, the fox is in
the
hen house. Do whatever you like." After retiring from Congress in 1996,
he
became a lobbyist for Pakistan under a contract that paid him $30,000 a
month. Meanwhile, the United States lost interest in Afghanistan, which
descended into a civil war that the Taliban ultimately won. In the autumn of
2001, the United States returned in force after Al Qaeda retaliated against
its former weapon supplier by attacking New York and Washington. The
president of the United States went around asking, "Why do they hate us?"

Crile knows a lot about these matters and presents them in a dramatic manner.
There are, however, one or two items that he appears unaware of or is suppressing.
For the CIA legally to carry out a covert action, the president must authorize
a document called a finding. Crile repeatedly says that Carter signed such a
finding ordering the CIA to provide covert backing to the moujahedeen after
the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on Dec. 24, 1979. The truth of the matter
is that Carter signed the finding on July 3, 1979, six months before the Soviet
invasion, and he did so on the advice of his national security advisor, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, in order to try to provoke a Russian incursion. Brzezinski has confirmed
this sequence of events in an interview with a French newspaper, and former
CIA Director Robert M. Gates says so explicitly in his 1996 memoirs. It may
surprise Charlie Wilson to learn that his heroic moujahedeen were manipulated
by Washington like so much cannon fodder in order to give the USSR its own Vietnam.
The moujahedeen did the job, but as subsequent events have made clear, they
may not be grateful to the United States.

This piece was first published by the Los Angeles Times and is reprinted with permission of the author.

More Comments:

Marios Adamides -
12/2/2009

Gust Avracotos was a Greek American who served in Greece in 1974. He convinced the then dictator Ioannides that if he made a coup d'etat against the President of Cyprus the USA would not allow Turkey to invade Cyprus. The question is whether that was his honest personal opinion or part of wider conspiracy by the USA to change the status quo in Cyprus. Anyway Turkey did invade Cyprus in 1974, 5,000-10,000 people got killed, terrible atrocities were committed by the Turkish troops, have the population of Cyprus became refugees and the island of Cyprus is still divided. The naive Dictator Ioannides at 86 is still in prison and the Greek American CIA agent who was so successful in Afganistan committed serious treason to the motherland of his parents probably without foreseing the consequences of his advice. Also without wanting it he made a good thing to his parents'motherland:After the disaster in Cyprus the Greek junta collapsed after 7 years in power and democracy returned to Greece in 1974 reborn in the blood of Cyprus.....

Milo Lowe -
9/26/2007

The mujahadeen fought to free Afghanistan from Soviet invaders. What does that have to do with anything but freeing a sovereign nation from occupiers? Would you prefer that they allow themselves to be occupied by an uninvited army of Christian invaders? Also you clearly lack education regarding Sudan as well. The Sudanese issue is one of resources and the Sudanese that are dying are Muslims not Christians. But you insist on twisting the facts to suit your smear campaign. Of course Americans rarely care for the black peoples of Africa until it gives them an excuse to slander Muslims.

Milo Lowe -
9/26/2007

The mujahadeen fought to free Afghanistan from Soviet invaders. What does that have to do with anything but freeing a sovereign nation from occupiers? Would you prefer that they allow themselves to be occupied by an uninvited army of Christian invaders? Also you clearly lack education regarding Sudan as well. The Sudanese issue is one of resources and the Sudanese that are dying are Muslims not Christians. But you insist on twisting the facts to suit your smear campaign. Of course Americans rarely care for the black peoples of Africa until it gives them an excuse to slander Muslims.

Tom Frankie Franklin -
12/17/2005

I'm waiting for my girlfriend and I got bored so I surfed and found this pathetic excuse for another boring attack on American foreign policy. Why cant she hurry up? Damn it, LET ME OUTTA HERE! O.k., you are right! We american all-white christian males ARE EVIL, O.K.? (but not russian ones, unless they are russian american)
We oppressed the uh, oh, you know...I feel....so..
....guilty....difficult...to...breathe.....AH! She is ready, so o.k....good luck with your World War III against the NAZI "president" of Iran. What a great guy! Calling for the eradication of another member state of the U.N....gosh love 'em. Did you know he believes he is the "12th Imam" who will lead Islam to victory in a world war? Soon he will have nukes, isn't that great? How nice for them,huh? cya

Tom Frankie Franklin -
12/17/2005

Why are you wasting your time on this b.s.?

Tom Frankie Franklin -
12/17/2005

Good luck with that. I hope you have your iodine pills.

Tom Frankie Franklin -
12/17/2005

Hey, when you scratch an anti-communist, you always find anti-gay uh, attitudes! Damn those conservatives, starting the secret war against Islam so we could get rid of the gay loving muslims!

Tom Frankie Franklin -
12/17/2005

Yes, Mr. Z.B. is pure evil and is the cause of all evil in the universe. Those nice russians had no interest of their own in invading the country.

Tom Frankie Franklin -
12/17/2005

Dear madam,
You say "Carter signed the finding on July 3, 1979, six months before the Soviet invasion, and he did so on the advice of his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in order to try to provoke a Russian incursion". Wow, so it was that damned signed piece of paper and the ensuing six months of anti-revolutionary evil by the Americans in Afghanistan that caused our (your) conquering heroes to invade the country.
Gee, Wally, most Americans think just like you do, NOT!!!

Barbara -
6/16/2003

I once read that history was not merely an account of dates, events and places but rather the emotional and intellectual evolution of man. History then is a timeline marking the devolopement of mankind to reason as well as emancipate themselves from violent solutions while striving for lasting and judicious remedies.
It is becoming obvious that there are some who have yet to emerge from the neolithic age. The colossal reckoning resulting from our past actions should arouse all "evolved" citizens. A combined effort to discard subversive policy and expose official mis-truths is the only path towards world reconciliation. Manipulative covert behavior assumes an outcome that can not be prophetsied and the promise of a secure nation is corrupted by resurgent hostilities.
This small world will know no future, have no history unless mankinds might reflects not the arms of war but instead arms that embraces .

David Howard -
6/12/2003

Google and type in "Operation Ringwind"

Herodotus -
6/12/2003

hear hear.

Stephen Kriz -
6/12/2003

Mr. Safranski:

You obviously haven't been reading enough history. I'm not worried about the wonks at Langley. I'm worried about the true believer zealots who are at the moment destabilizing governments in Colombia, Angola, Venezuela and elsewhere. Count on blowback and pray it doesn't hit you or your family.

Pray for peace and thoughtful governance,

Steve Kriz

mark safranski -
6/11/2003

Good grief.You have been watching too much Oliver Stone. Most of the folks at the CIA are either administrative bureaucrats or mild-mannered Ph.d analysts of a variety of political views - they certainly aren't right-wing lunatics.

Homer Simpson -
6/11/2003

Takes a Homer to say this Kriz.

You are a non-entity, just another blowhard.

The CIA isn't interested in you, Kriz. They haven't heard of you.

Have a beer. Go fishing. Find a hobby less destructive to your mental health than the blowhard carrying on.

In other words, Kriz, get a life!

Stephen Kriz -
6/11/2003

Chalmers Johnson is doing the American Republic a great service by exposing the CIA as the corrupt, out of control monster that it truly is. Mr. Johnson is also exposing himself to great risk in doing so, as I also likely am, by posting this comment on the Internet with my real name attached to it. The CIA is an extra-Constitutional abomination that was created at the start of the Cold War, in large part due to the failures of U.S. intelligence before the attack on Pearl Harbor. However, history should have taught us not to surrender our liberties just because we are under attack. We gave up a significant part of our liberties in 1947, with the passage of the National Security Act and now we have done so again in 2001, with the USA Patriot Act. As Jefferson so eloquently put it, "Those who would sacrifice liberty for security, deserve neither."

Dissolution of the CIA, or at the very least, radical surgery needs to be applied to this beast, if we are to ever achieve a peaceful world. The CIA has had a hand in many, if not most, of the wars or internal conflicts of the last 60 years around the world. From setting up the Shah of Iran to selling cocaine to fund the Contras, to training and funding Usama bin Laden and his merry band of mujahedeen in Afghanistan, the CIA's misdeeds have resulted in "blowback" that has killed countless numbers of innocents in America and around the world. The gutting of the CIA should be an issue on which both liberals and conservatives can agree. Conservatives should object to the extra-Constitutionality of the CIA (their budget, after all, is not reviewed by or approved by Congress), as well as the massive amount of federal tax dollars that are squandered in feeding this insatiable beast. Liberals should object to the egregious abuses of human rights that the CIA engages in, as well as the serious impediment to world peace and tranquility that this craven bureaucracy represents.

We should set aside partisan differences and work together to end this corrupt, unnecessary and ultimately, evil organization. Again, thank you very much, Mr. Johnson, for exposing this hideously corrupt organization that has no place in a free society.

Greg -
6/11/2003

In "The Largest Covert Operation in CIA History" Chalmers Johnson claims that the CIA has a near 100% failure rate in covert operations and names several high-profile failures to support that claim. Did it ever occur to anyone that the CIA is usually successful in its operations, and that part of the success is that they remain "secret"?

This is beside the point of the article though, which is that our support of Afghanistan during the Cold War, like many Cold War actions, is coming back to bite us in the ass. What can you say, except "what was the alternative?" and "hindsight is 20/20".

Josh Greenland -
6/11/2003

Is the George Crile mentioned in the article as a book author the same man that produced an anti-gay pseudo-documentary in 1980 ("Gay Power, Gay Politics") as well as doing a Vietnam history documentary that got his network at the time (I thought CBS) sued by General Westmoreland?

Tim Starr -
6/11/2003

I have posted a rebuttal to Chalmers Johnson's take on "Charlie Wilson's War" at:

ARMAND DE LAURELL -
6/10/2003

The more it changes the more it stays the same.

During its hey day the British Empire undertook such acts as paying the local wogs Marie Louise dollars to have them murder Britains' Consuls and then have Parliamot [VOTE] to invade the heathen nation and bring about democractic reforms as well as friendlier governments.

But then was it not an infamous anonymous who said " if the end is justified so are the means". Should we be not looking forward to a socalled terrorist attack aginst the homeland just before the election in 2004. thereby guaranteeing either a reelection of possibly the declaration of martial law and the cancellation of the General Election in November 2004.

armand de laurell -
6/10/2003

George -
6/10/2003

Zibigniew Brzezinski evil plot to recruit, and foment hateful militant Islamic zealots into fighting the USSR may prove to be the most evil plot since Hitler. The Islamists, since then never stopped plotting to concur the world. Stopping militant Islam is much more difficult than Brzezinski or the US can ever imagine. The genie is out of the bottle. They have rediscovered JIHAD!

I would vote to bring Zib Brzezinski to charges of crimes against humanity. His action is responsible for the recent death of millions in the name of Islam, including the holocaust of the Christian Sudanese.